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TowerJazz, a specialty foundry leader, announced it has joined the IPL Alliance, an organization chartered with establishing an interoperable custom design ecosystem. The IPL Alliance, comprised of major EDA and foundry companies, has devised the first open standard for interoperable Process Design Kits (iPDK) for analog/mixed-signal designs. The iPDK is based on the OpenAccess database and uses standard languages and unified architecture that ensure interoperability among all EDA vendor tools. Engineering teams only need to develop a single PDK for each process node, which reduces development costs, shortens design cycles and provides designers with earlier access to advanced process technologies across multiple tools.

TowerJazz, a leader in specialty processes and design enablement, is developing best-in-class iPDKs that are derived from this standard. The benefits of iPDKs for customers over traditional proprietary PDKs include improved performance, increased reuse and portability through use of standards and broader EDA tool support. The pilot process for TowerJazz iPDKs will be its TS18 power management process; however, the roadmap will cover all of its processes and TowerJazz customers will have the flexibility to choose which types of EDA flow to use.

“We are pleased a leading specialty foundry like TowerJazz has joined the IPL Alliance to help promote standardization of PDKs, open innovation, and improved productivity and efficiency for analog and mixed-signal designs. RF and consumer devices are demanding increased integration so the analog portion is now the gating factor on many, if not all, SoC designs. Standardization can reduce PDK development cost while providing designers quicker access to complex process technologies,” said Jingwen Yuan, President of IPL Alliance and Strategic Alliance Manager at Synopsys.

“Our industry-leading design enablement capabilities set us apart and provide our customers with first time design success and a significant competitive market advantage. Joining the IPL Alliance further demonstrates our commitment to offering the industry’s best models and tools. The iPDK standard allows us to provide our customers with accelerated access to our advanced specialty technologies in a flexible way, resulting in fast product design timelines,” said Ori Galzur, Vice President, VLSI Design Center at TowerJazz.